U.S. Pat. No. 7,240,325 (Keller), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, allegedly discloses a “technique for generating a topology associated with a computing environment comprises the following steps/operations. First, components in the computing environment and their dependencies are identified. Identification comprises computing and traversing at least a portion of a model representative of an existence of one or more relationships associated with at least a portion of the components of the computing environment and which is capable of accounting for a full lifecycle (e.g., including deployment, installation and runtime) associated with at least one component of the computing environment. Then, the one or more identified components are presented in a topological representation based on the one or more relationships associated with the one or more identified components. The topological representation comprises a functional plane, a structural plane and an operational plane respectively corresponding to at least a portion of a functional categorization, a structural categorization and an operational categorization of the model. By way of example, the inventive techniques may be applied to a distributed computing environment. The computing environment may also be an autonomic computing environment.” See Abstract.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,343 (Goringe), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, allegedly discloses a “system for discovering a topology of a distributed processing network that includes a first topology discovery agent 308 configured to contact a first set of routers to obtain a first type of information stored in each router in the first set of routers; a second topology discovery agent 312 and/or 316 configured to contact a second set of routers to obtain a second type of information stored in each router in the second set of routers, and a phase controller 304 configured to select between the first and second topology discovery agents. The first and second sets of routers are different, and the first and second types of information are different. In one configuration, the first type of information is defined by a network management protocol, and the second type of information is defined by a routing protocol.” See Abstract.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,200,120 (Greenberg), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, allegedly discloses the “present invention permits a network operator to maintain a timely view of changes to an operational packet-switched network.” See Abstract.